Minutes of May 18, 2000 Meeting

AUL's report: Bob announced the Metro Selectors' meeting on June 5 at NYPL. An update on NetLibrary is one of the topics.

Bob reviewed the collection fund balances. It was noted that some of the encumbrances are still very high, even though most invoices have been paid. Several questions were raised and the figures will be resent via email.

The budget request for FY2001 has been submitted. 2001 is the second year of the 5 year plan. The new budget requests a 5% increase to cover serials price increases. Serials are expected to increase 10% so cancellations will still be necessary. The plan is that we will migrate 10% of purchases from print to electronic format each year. Overall, RUL has spent very little on books in recent years, and we've requested a $200,000 increase for books each years. Dana has spent < 8% of its budget on books; the science libraries have spent virtually nothing. Patron printing costs for the major libraries are not part of this budget request; those expenses are part of the photocopying budget.We have also requested an additional $200,000 each year to support the 12 areas of excellence identified by the University. Marianne has met with Dr. Seneca about the budget request, but there's been no word as of today. Bob indicated that we could possibly consider early payment for some of our serials vendors, but was cannot pay on one-line invoices.

Bids have been received for the patron printing project, and they are being reviewed.

Criminal Justice records will be removed from IRIS.

The Wiley deal is still under discussion.

RUL's policy on archiving electronic resources will be discussed at an upcoming CDC meeting.

Important Free (Unrestricted) Online Resources: Jeanne reviewed the issues surrounding free vs. fee access. The free versions of, for example, PubMed and Agricola are not quite as good as the Ovid versions we subscribe to. Nonetheless, should we include free resources such as PubMed and Agricola on our index page? Should we include them in IRIS?
What is our rationale for including a resource on our website? If we were to cancel Ovid Agricola, should we move the free version to the top level index page? A vigorous discussion followed. There are so many freebies on the internet and we can't catalog everything. The sense of the group was that free electronic journals and other e-resources should be added to IRIS when put forth by individual selectors. Electronic resources should be selected following the same criteria as any collection development decision. Resources should be added to the electronic indexes page following the same rational approach to selection. It was suggested that the online form be developed for free materials. [This has already be done.] Another suggestion was made to change the title of the Indexes page to Indexes and Databases.

Ann reported on database use statistics and cautioned that there is little consistency in how vendors report these figures. Systems will soon implement the next release of Novell to support RUNet 2000. A new server has been purchased for the payroll system. Systems is in the
process of implementing Sirsi's new Materials/Media Booking module. They are looking at the implications of remote access to Ovid databases (instead of loading the data locally). The VALE databases will remain local. Final details on EEBO are being worked out. Holdings statements
will be added for both fiche and online records.

Fund Code Revision: After considerable discussion, it was decided that we should compress the fund codes for PER, NON-PER-CUR, and NEWSPAPERS into one category called PER. The material type categories for FY2001 will be: MONOGRAPHS, APPROVAL, MONOPUB SER, PER, PACKAGES, RETRO, MEMBERSHIPS.

Further discussion led to the decision to group each fund code into one broad subject category: Arts & Humanities, Science, Social Sciences, and Interdisciplinary, such as we held with Innopac. This change is expected to provide collection development people with better reports from Sirsi. Another issue discussed was compressing all of the New Brunswick libraries into one location. This needs more discussion to insure that the full implication of the change are understood before the change is made.

Cancellations 2001: Bob, Howard, Veronica, and Jim led discussion on the serials cancellation process for the coming year. Howard developed a methodology that uses JCR to determine cost per use for science titles. JCR ranks 2,500 journals by impact factor. Howard has determined that RUL owns 495 titles with an impact factor of < .5, at a cost of approximately $321,000. This group of titles might warrant a close look for cancellation. We have to develop a plan for non-science titles.